Hi,

I'm a complete newbie! I have always wanted to make a comic book but I lack the artistic talent. So, I want to use Poser to help me do this. The problem is that I don't know which one to get. I see there is a Poser Artist out there (basically version 4). And I also see Poser 5 is out.

What I want to do is to buy one of these versions and buy some "super-hero" models that are out there. Then I can just pose and render my comic book. And perhaps as my skill increases I can draw and design my own models later on.

Thanks for any help or information.

Hi radeon9600, I would recommend "Poser Artist" (Poser4) to start because it will be much easier to learn. cheers, dr geep ;=]

Welcome Radeon! Hopefully I won't be the only one who responds to your post! In my opinion Poser4 is quite powerful for the low price (check Amazon or bbay for it). I've used Poser4 for about 2 years and had very little trouble with it (most of the problems were things that I did wrong). I've debated updating to Poser5 but, I've read WAY too many complaints about it in the forums. I would also need to upgrade my CPU for it - the CPU ain't broke so I ain't gonna fix it ;) On a side note, you may also want to get a good postwork program like Photoshop or PaintShopPro since the rendering engine in Poser isn't perfect. I prefer Photoshop but, that one cost me a bundle ($580). My roomie has PSP and it does just as well. I've seen it for under $200. Well, that's my -5 cents worth. Hope it helps! CyberscapE

me, i use poser 5 and have been, since I got it. the only problem it gave me was the lights being to many and too many people on one scean.

Go with 5. Face room is quick and easy for making unique characters to help tell your story.

Go with the one you can afford, lol! I'm rather big on Poser 5, because it provides you with more options than Poser 4 (P4). But Poser 4 still isn't down for the count yet, and likely won't be for a while. There is more "support" for Poser 4, as many folks were very unhappy with the performance of P5 when it was first released (There have been three service packs so far, with a fourth and final coming within the month), and around here one person grumbling tends to infect about eight others, and all of them are more vocal than the folks that are happy. Dr. Geep is correct -- and he's got the best tutorials on using Poser's features available to get you started (and he hangs around here a lot answering questions as well). Poser 4 is easier to learn. Both programs can do much the same thing. Someone noted earlier "the rendering engine in Poser isn't perfect" which is misleading (no renderer is perfect) -- what they meant to say was that at times the limitations of poser -- in figures, in lighting, and in what the renderer is capable of -- can get in the way, and many folks have taken to "postworking" their renders to make them look better. (me, I'm whatcha call a "purist", I guess -- I like to squeeze everything out of Poser 1st, then dab a tiny bit here or there.) Nothing wrong with either approach -- it's a matter of taste and skill (I have more skill with poser than I do photoshop, hee hee). I also want to note that Poser can be useful, but you'll still have plenty of work to do to make your images "yours" once you do get it. Good luck, and may the render be with you.

For comic book work I use a combination of Poser 4 for creating and posing the characters, and Bryce for rendering them. This overcomes any shortcomings in the Poser 4 render engine. Poser 4 + Vue is also a good combination.

Poser5 is way better than P4. I have progressed from P4 to ProPack to P5, and find P5 to be a great program. There is really no need to export to an external renderer with P5. Most of the negativity you read is pure baseless whining.

hee hee -- smehow I knew you'd have that to say, Phantast, hee hee hee

Out of curiosity, what are they down to selling P4 for anyway? It would have to be dirt cheap to not buy 5 instead...

P4 - Pro nuff said "Most of the negativity you read is pure baseless whining" Look in the credits for P5... you'll find my name. I don't use P5... what does that tell you? Doug Sturk www.sturkwurk.com

It all depends on Your computer. If it's a good machine, than i reccomend Poser5 (material room! really good shaders can be done there and thus less postwork is left to be done in order to, let's say, adjust the skin tone). As for me, I'm using Poser5 AND Photoshop. Sometimes 3d Studio Max for backgrounds. I don't do importing figures, as I like to re-pose them whenever I want and I cannot do that outside Poser. In the sample I've attached (a comic I'm working on apart from my regular story, WindWeaver), I've used Poser5 for setting and rendering, Photoshop for tone adjustments and composing the page. The ugly men on small panels are Poser5 face room figures... The girl is Steph petite (my morph) and the elf guy is Michael3 with bishonen morphs... After this shameless self-promotion...;)))) no, seriously, I hope it helps you with your decision, Radeon!

And that's from one of the top five guys is Poser comics. If you want to know how to do superheroes in poser, he's the guy to check in with. Content creation is a tad different from development. But I will say that not all the whining is baseless. Use what you know. Always. Unless yer brave or crazy, lol

OK....Poser til um 65! nuf said.....i got Photoshop, Carrara, and C4D..... i use the first 3 progs....then maybe...maybe...if im feeling lucky maybe C4D....that prog cost me a bundle....but i dunt use it that often....Carrara is actually a prog i dunt also use that much....whats wrong with me? =)

Doug Sturk, I know you make some nice products. I have some of them. Just because you have some reasons, unspecified, to dislike P5 does not mean that I experience any trouble with it. I can only speak from my own experience. Maybe you could list what you find wrong with it. You obviously think you are one badass dude slinging an argument from intimidation.

You obviously think you are one badass dude slinging an argument from intimidation Did I miss something here? Doug said he worked on P5 and doesn't use it, apparently because he's not satisfied with the final product.

He gave no facts, no observations, nothing concrete. Just a broad slam and a question. "I don't use P5... what does that tell you?" That tells me nothing but that there is some unstated reason for him not using it. Why ask me that? My own answer could be "Maybe there is a business or political motive." When you use your name, or position, or perception of power/authority to back up your arguments instead of facts or observations, it is using "argument by intimidation." So, since this guy, whom I respect, says P5 is no good, should I disregard my own knowledge and experience and just quit using it or discussing? No. The name will not sway me, nor should it anyone else. I did not say ALL negative comments about P5 are baseless. And ynsaen said much the same thing in one of his posts. I felt compelled to mention the negative comments since radeon brought up the point that these comments were influencing his decision.

I am under a NDA, but let's see if this skirts on the boundries of what I can write. Well let's see, I ran P5 on a AMD 1.1 with 768 MB ram... P5 crashed over 100 times, after installing the third update. As I've written before, I don't dislike P5, my computer does. Now, if you want to toss out names and accusations feel free, but for me P5 was a waste of time. I can't openly recommend the application for anyone, even though it may work just fine on 90% of the users perfectly, it's the other 10% I don't want to hurt. We'll see what the next SR release does.

For the sake of accuracy, I shall list what it is about P5 that I find makes it a better choice than P4. 1. The rendering engine has raytracing - allowing reflections and refractions and freedom from the (my opinion) inferior shadow-mapping and the associated hard-to-adjust shadow-cams. The speed of rendering (with optimum settings) I find to be faster than P4. There is no shadow-map calculation when raytracing. This must be counted in the rendering process. 2. Polygon Smoothing - when properly applied improves the figures' appearance. I see a lot of negative comments about this feature. If you apply it to everything in the scene it will be a render-time disaster. I only use it on main character figures like V3, M3, Judy, etc. It adds little-to-nothing to the render time. 3. Improved Library interface - It is a lot easier to add figures, props, poses, etc. with this much-improved menu system. 4. Python support - This is a great feature - open modularity for a wide array of functions. ProPack has Python, also. 5. Materials Room - Procedural textures in P5 are amazing. Easy to use and capable of an astronomical amount of combinations with or without texture maps. The procedural textures are often many orders of magnitude faster at rendering than even a tiled texture-imagemap. 6. Dynamic Hair - I am just starting to use this feature. It seems to work fine, for my first few uses. I have not used Dynamic Clothing yet, so I am unable to comment on it. So - I have stated what I find good about P5. It crashes far less than P4 and PPP, at least for me. A crash is a rare event. It is not slow, nor a resource hog - in fact is faster and less of a burden on the system, at least for me. It does have some sort of RAM memory leak, which shows up after a long day of rendering and requires a reboot. This is the most obvious flaw I have noticed.

Yep, all cool factors... but I still don't think that people with problems with P5 are to be catagorized as "whining" about it. That's not fair to use in the promoting of the application. I'm hardly whining about it. If all of the reported problems were just people whingin, then why is Curious Labs still working on another update? It's been what, 16 months since the application was released? Now, the situation here is... a "complete newbie" has asked for a reccomendation. Now... will a "complete newbie" be able to use and understand all of the items you've listed? I doubt it. I'll still stick with recommending P4 Pro... or Poser Artist for now. Maybe a year from now they can just upgrade to P6 when it comes out, hopefully it'll be stable. Doug

Doug, I was not accusing you of having a biased opinion. I was stating what an open-ended question like the one you asked might POSSIBLY lead an active imagination to assume. I know some percentage of users have problems with all versions of Poser. Maybe I am just lucky with P5. I had way more trouble with P4 and PPP. When a group of people has a problem, yet I do not, I must assume the problem is with either their usage of the product, or their machines. If EVERYBODY had the same problem, then the product is to blame.

It also depends on what you actually want to do. you can: 1. Use poser to render the complete panels and scenes. In that case poser 4 will do but poser 5 is better cause it handles more rendering capabilities. I use this mostly. Plus with python you can batch render meaning you can set up your scene then fire off a script that renders all frames while you sleep or work. 2. Use poser as a drawing aid. In this method you use poser to set up a figure then print them out in outline or wire frame modes then trace and draw your panels. Here Poser 4 will do nicely since you don't need rendering capability. A very cheap, and fast way to get professional looking art. All you need to know is how to trace, add details and ink. 3. Rendering cartoon mode. This is a special render mode used to create disney/anime/simple color cartoon looks. Poser 5 does this. Poser 4 doesn't or you have to do a lot of tricks to get it to do so. Again all panels are rendered in this mode and the comic is made that way. Its basically a render variant. 4. Use poser for gray scale renders to be converted to BW line art. I have had some success with this and am currently working on a methodology to get this more efficient. Works real well with simple types and simple back grounds like using Anime Doll. Basically you use the cartoon display mode or even the cartoon render mode to render your scene. You then bring it into photoshop as a gray scale and position frames, do touch up etc. On a final pass you convert the page to 300/600 or 900 dpi black and white (two color) using duotone or dither filters. Voila you have work that looks a lot like professional line art and is printer ready. In this case you could get by with p4 but p5 works much better if you use the toon shaders. hope that helps

"You obviously think you are one badass dude slinging an argument from intimidation." Sounds like you were accusing me of something there. No biggie. Didnt hurt me a bit. No worries. Render on. Cheers, Doug

orders of magnitude? Orders of magnitude? maybe a wee bit overstating the case there.... And I'm lacking the proper equipment for the pronoun used. Easy mistake, though. Radeon9600, please ignore the intervening posts. lol How much ya wanna spend and how much time ya got to learn it? Both have several elements that recommend themselves, both have flaws, and no one will ever agree on them ;) Poser Artist provides a tried system with loads of community support and content. It has a shorter learning curve and lower price, and is an older version. ProPack is sorta in between -- additional functionality, with a focus on portability of content and greater ease in creating your own. (Still isn't easy, though) Poser 5 is the current version, offering a lot more jazzy features, the same hiccups as in the previous versions, and a learning curve that isn't gentle and easy. Most of the community itself is still adapting to it (artists are slow to accept new tools, and these folks are artists, make no mistake -- good, bad, and often inbetween, but still artists), still learning it. Everything else -- what any of us think about any of them, is sorta like walking a land mine field: yer gonna go boom eventually, it's just a matter of the steps ya take...

Go with Poser 5. Thanks to Sr3 the stability is extremely good and there is rarely a reason to actually spend money on a non current verison of a program if you intend on using it for a while.

How many people do you want to put in one scene? Over 3-- stick to Poser 4-- I prefer ProPack, slightly more stable. How much ram do you have? At least one Gig is recommended by me. I have 2, it's still ohmygod slow. Operating system, if you have Win98 or ME, forget Poser 5. Bottom line, no matter what Poser version you pick, you will have probs. This is not a stable program and hasn't been for awhile. There are memory leaks in every single version and after a prolonged period of working with it, you're gonna have to reboot if you're doing anything thing complicated in your scene. That with any Poser. Since Poser 5 tends to get very slow-- especially if you let the main Runtime get too large, and you have to use the main runtime for the morphs for Daz's millenium3 models. Yup, even the dog. Ok, since 5 runs slowly, that period when you have to reboot comes much quicker, you get less done in the same amount of time. You'll have a lot more fun in Poser 4. For the record, I use Poser 5 exclusively because of the ability to use multiple RUntimes. It drives me nutz. 3G processor, 2G's memory, still slow. Emily

IMO, go with P4/ProPak for: 1) speed 2) ease of use 3) better learning curve 4) stability and reliability 5) multiple figures/props per scene Go with P5 if: 1) you're willing to take risks 2) you want and are willing to take the time to learn: a) dynamic hair b) dynamic clothing c) custom faces d) more advanced--and much harder--materials application For a comic book I doubt you'd need or use a thru d above. I'd advise any new user to start with P4 and maybe ProPak. Poser is hard enough to learn on its own let alone all the added weight P5 adds. That added weight, along with P5's well-known instability and slowness, might be enough to make a newbie throw up his or her hands and quit. Learn the basics of Poser first and maybe, by the time you do, P6 will be out. PS: I've made a few comic books myself. Used P4 for all of them. I play with P5 when I have time to waste, I use P4 when I want to get something done.

Yo Sturkwurk: Connatic jumped me over at DAZ in the forums for saying basically the same thing...that Poser 5 is useless to me. So don't feel singled out g

no sweat movida, He was right, I should have backed up my initial post with a full explination. I honestly still use P4 Pro for almost everything I render. Otherwise I just import into Lightwave, or Vue. Doug

"There is really no need to export to an external renderer with P5. Most of the negativity you read is pure baseless whining." I agree with you on all counts except one. There IS a reason to look outside P5 for rendering. Speed. Other than that, it can be used to duplicate almost anything the "high end" guys can put out. Only several times slower. ;)

i chose P5 over P4 without really doing my homework on em.... i got Intel Celeron 1.0 Gig 66Mgz FSB 512 PC-133 SDRAM 20 Gig. Drive (half full) 32 Mg VRAM A crappy motherboard so far the only problems ive had with P5 is when I start to render too many shadows from lights....the comp doesnt hang up or anything...it just takes a loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time to complete the render....i tried a render with global illumination with all shadows cast.......after 5 hours of rendering i just canceled the render process.....the comp didnt hang up through all that! it was just slow... P5 is great man!

Hi Ariah, Gosh I like your comic renderings. Very much. How do you do it? ARe they mostly in poser 5? what sort of post work do you do? I mean to you just do a photoshop filter or a little set of actions that you've made for photoshop, or do you process each pic individually? Love esther

"so far the only problems ive had with P5 is when I start to render too many shadows from lights....the comp doesnt hang up or anything...it just takes a loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time to complete the render....i tried a render with global illumination with all shadows cast.......after 5 hours of rendering i just canceled the render process.....the comp didnt hang up through all that! it was just slow..." Yep. That's the one reason people would look outside the app for rendering for sure. P5 is slow if you have a lot of lights, but this can be remedied a bit using probelight. That's like "baking" the GI on to the models through their materials. However, this in itself can be time consuming as well, and sometimes takes longer to figure out than just exporting it and rendering somewhere that has actual GI. I did a little render not too long ago. Faked GI using global illumination "lights" setup I found online (maybe runtimeDNA or somewhere). Took just over 6 hours to render. UGH. Dropped the same scene in 3dsMax, using Vray render system. 35 minutes with medium irradience map at 1600x1200. That's a BIG big difference in speed. Plus the Max one just looked better in the end. I love P5 though, and try to use it's Firefly as much as I possibly can. But when I absolutely want GI for a scene, it's off to Max I go (usually). ;)

well for me it really is more of a comp specs thing than a program.... for true GI and caustics i have Carrara 2.1 and C4D....but em progs dunt help me none cause a render with GI/caustics takes a very long time 2 render....so em programs are just as useful as P5 rendering GI..i never found out how long it would take since i cancel the renders 1/4 through...um talkin about hours and hours! maybe even a day! so it really is a computer hardware problem for me....once i upgrade then maybe a 1 hour render would really seem to me like a blink of an eye since i got too used to waiting hours and hours.

I have an archaic Celeron computer which runs Poser 4 & 5 and all my software just fine. Can't remember the last time the computer crashed, running Poser or any other software. I got rid of all my crashes by aggressively updating all my hardware and software, then moving up to Windows XP.

to make comic strips like that, I'd use poser 4 for more people in a image, but poser 5 for better qulity of images.

Thanks for all the advice guys. I'm still having a hard time deciding which one to get. Part of me is leaning towards Poser Artist because it supposedly has an easier learning curve while the other part is leaning towards Poser 5 because I like the idea of those "cartoon shaders".

yull also have to get Pro Pack...so tack on sum extra bucks.....

This learning curve thing is a red herring. If you don't use any of the extra features then P5 doesn't have a learning curve any different from Poser 4. As for the "well known" instability? Umm... no. The vast majority of those who had problems have later discussed that they were solved with SR3 and many of us NEVER had the problems. In fact, it seems that only a fairly small number of people had significant problems. Slow? Poser5 isn't any slower than Poser4 for me. Obviously if I use the ray tracing engien it is slower because, well, its using a more sophisticated renderer. Baseline use? No slower... there is no extra "weight" really - if your not using the features they don;t seem to have any effect ons peed. So .... Speed - the same for the same tasks Stability - the same or better Asset management - significantly better in P5 Rendering abilities - significantly better in P5 (want a real reflection? Better looking shadows? Better lighting abilities? Better looking skin? Then p5 or an external renderer will be needed) In fact, I don't know of a single advantage P4 has on anything but the most underpowered computers.

I'm gonna disagree with soulhuntre-- nothing personal involved. There was a significent learning curve for me in Poser 5-- the Material Room. Which even with a killer tutorial on it at PoserPros, still I dont know all the ins and outs of it. Poser is the only 3d proggie I know at all well, though I worked a bit in Bryce. It took me all of one one month to get proficient in Poser 4-- I think that's the shortest learning curve I know of. That's proficient enough to make something quick easy and have fun doing it. I really enjoyed using Poser 4-- with SnowSultan's Ztoons method, I don't know if you really need P5's toon shaders. I'm in Poser 5 because I have way too much stuff for Poser 4's library management. Here's one other unmentioned reason for using Poser Artist or P4-- you will be able to import pz3's that's standard Poser scene saves into Daz Studio [its in Alpha now, set to go into beta in the spring and looks to be a killer renderer] Poser 5 is not supported in D/S-- yet, maybe never. D/S is free. Emily